It is not uncommon for game players to cheat in order to appear to be better players than they truly are. Cheating can be especially exacerbating in the online gaming community in which players compete with each other. Often, cheating is in the form of modifications to a game application such as, for example, changes to game data constants and/or characteristics, including the amount of ammunition, the strength of an item, the health of a player, the position of walls, deleting of walls from a map to enable a player to shoot through walls in the game, or the like.
To make modifications to a game, a user typically hacks into her own version of the game application. In many cases, the first step towards hacking the game application is to determine exactly what the game software is doing. One relatively simple way to determine what the game software is doing is to attach a debugger to the game software while it is executing, and observing the instructions and contents of memory. Through debugging, a hacker can discern appropriate places and means for tampering with the game code. Accordingly, game developers are known to install debugger checkers in game code to prevent users from attaching a debugger to the game application. Typically, however, debugger checkers are simple to detect and to circumvent.